mortiz080

I've been in Salzburg, Austria for the past week...  It's just as lovely as you might imagine--the Alps surround a large river valley, it's endlessly green, and the Altstadt ("old town") is full of medieval streets, lined with churches and shops that have been around for hundreds of years.  And yes, the hills are alive with the sound of music--at least I went to enough concerts to convince me of this.   The surrounding area has a web of bike/foot paths and streams that seem to run every possible way.  They're lovely, but it's a little confusing when you first arrive, although you learn the paths quickly.  That's when you start to notice the little things--the things that make you say "What?"   My first big surprise (after I got to know the place a bit) was the peculiar behavior of a stream that I passed often on my walks.  As I walked to the foot of a pathway that climbed up to the castle wall, I had to pass over a small stream.  It was ...

Getting your SearchResearch posts by email...  IF you want to get these SearchResearch posts by email (rather than by checking in every few days), here's how to do this.    (1) Log in with your email account (your-name@gmail.com ...or whatever it is) (2)  go to the Google Group page to sign up for the email version   (3) Click on the sign-up button as shown below:  And, if you want to unsubscribe, just reverse this.  (That is, come back to this page, and click unsub.)   Hope many more of you join the email group!   -- Dan 

Our goal is to plot data by region..   .. an immensely handy thing to be able to do if you want to do basic analysis of geo-localized data.  For instance, here's a map of all the counties in the US, with color mapping out the median income for each county:  Figure 1. Median household income by county (2012). P/C Wikimedia . Our Challenge for this week was to do something very similar--let me remind you of our Challenge:   1.  Can you make a map of the median household income for each of the MSAs in the United States?  (Or equivalent statistical areas, if you're from another country.)   As I pointed out, we can break down this problem into a few pieces:  1. Find a data set for the median household income that's organized by MSAs.     2. FInd a data set for the MSAs shapes.   3.  Find a visualization application that can ingest both the median income data and the shape of the MSA and create a map similar to ...

It's time for a Challenging Challenge!   As you know, every so often I like to mix up the SRS Challenge with something that's a bit more in-depth.  (And if this is overwhelming, just take the week off--I'll be back next week with an easier one.)  The Setup:  If you read the news these days you'll see all kinds of claims about various kinds of data.  In an earlier SRS post we talked about immigration rates , and found that the data is a bit complicated, but you can figure it out.   One of the things you'll see in the news are charts like this one:  .. by COUNTY (not MSA or CSA). This is the "Median household income in 2012 by county."  This chart is from Wikimedia  and shows the median income by county  in the US.  Of course, counties are sometimes just arbitrary boundaries.  They may or may-not make sense.  (For instance, Los Angeles County has around 10M souls living inside the county, while only 600K people liv...